A small house fire story

A small house fire story

       It finally happened to me.

I had a small electrical fire in the kitchen that I inadvertently caused when cooking some sausage. I ended up cooking the sausage in the microwave oven. My inadvertence was just from using an old and damaged electrical cooking instrument.

 

Lessons learned:

 

1.  I had a fire extinguisher that readily put out the small and sputtering fire. I wish I had practiced a little more, like even rereading the directions again. The fire extinguishers had multiple safety widgets that made using them (I tried three) more difficult. It was a powder type fire extinguisher that worked and which left a lot of powder mess for me to gladly clean up.

 

2.  The battery powered smoke alarms worked as advertised. There was a lot of smoke from the fire. The inside dog evacuated the house, for whatever that is worth. The yard dogs were mostly barking from the smoke alarms beeping.

 

3.  I aired the house out and it was chilly, but I just put on more warm clothes until the air was good enough to close off the house, again.

 

4.  It was not as bad as the smoke I breathed from the oil well fires in Kuwait, but it was still pretty bad. I thought about using breathing filters, but chose not to.

 

The whole episode could have the makings of a one act play, kinda like the Keystone Cops meets a jug screw; except it was not funny to me at the time.